David mccullough library.., p.303
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set, page 303
She had interests other than marriage, she insisted, interests she knew he regarded as “unwomanly.” Her favorite nights at home were those when Theodore came bursting in from one of his political meetings “full of it all.” Douglas was her “dear old fellow,” to be sure, but she was utterly unable to say she loved him and would not until she did. But following an afternoon ride with Theodore up Riverside Drive, she wrote, “Such a lovely long talk as we had ... He is very fond of you, Douglas, and said there was not a single other man he knew except you that he would like me to marry.” “Sometimes,” she wrote later, “I think if I could have one talk with my father it would be all right.”
Alice and Corinne became close companions, shopping together, making social calls, reading aloud to each other. With Bamie, Alice seems to have acted with a certain restraint, that same edge of respect, even deference shown by others toward Bamie since childhood. If at a party she found herself caught in conversation with some formidable someone whose mind ranged beyond her own, she wished always, Alice said, that Bamie could be there to take her place. One rainy evening toward spring, when Mittie was not feeling well, the three young women—Alice, Corinne, and Bamie—sat with Mittie in her room talking at length of their own lives and ambitions. Bamie would have preferred to live in more stirring times, she said, and to have taken a prominent part. “What a splendid queen she would have made,” wrote Corinne to Douglas. “With you and Teddy as prime ministers and Elliott as master of ceremonies, you might have ruled the world!!”
The one false note in the picture was the inclusion of Douglas Robinson—a gesture of kindness on Corinne’s part—for there could never be but one prime minister to Queen Bamie; no one could possibly be regarded on a par with Theodore in the eyes of his two sisters, then or ever. Their love for him was a force, a presence precluding, as it would turn out, any feelings of comparable intensity for any other man—as Corinne herself had all but said already to her long-suffering, distant suitor.
And possibly, everything considered, it was Alice’s acute awareness of this, her seemingly instinctive understanding of how very much Theodore meant to the other Roosevelt women and her pleasure in their presence in her married life, that speaks most for her character. As Corinne herself observed long afterward, Alice was wholly unselfish about sharing Theodore with his adoring, now entirely female family. It was this that endeared her most to them and made her at once one of them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Home Is the Hunter
1
Some years afterward, reflecting on the personality of Theodore Roosevelt, a friend and fellow politician by the name of John S. Wise wrote that it would be mistaken to picture Theodore as resembling his father. He had never known the father, Wise acknowledged. “But from all accounts of him he was one of the gentlest, most lovable, public-spirited and popular men that ever lived in New York City.” Theodore, however, had not inherited “the gentler traits” of the father. “In his sturdiness and love of life’s battles and enterprises, he much more resembled his uncle, Mr. Robert Roosevelt, who had been my friend and associate these many years.”
Then Wise spoke of the Roosevelt he liked best, about whom the general public knew little or nothing, Elliott, “the most lovable Roosevelt I ever knew.”
He was one of my earliest acquaintances in New York and our attachment grew from the moment of our first meeting until his death. Perhaps he was nothing like so aggressive or so forceful a man as Theodore, but if personal popularity could have bestowed public honors on any man there was nothing beyond the reach of Elliott Roosevelt.
Little that counted for “home news,” the news he hungered for, was lost on Elliott during his time away, so thoroughly, so conscientiously was he posted by Mittie, Bamie, Theodore, Corinne, and by the ever sympathetic Aunt Annie, whose affection for him surpassed even what she felt for the other three of her sisters children. “At present I have thirty-two! letters to answer,” he declared at one point in his travels. Aunt Annie alone, we know, wrote him a total of sixty-one times.
He was apprised of the ups and downs of Corinne’s romance and from four or five different perspectives. Word of her engagement left him “flabbergasted.” (“Is Bamie showing any signs of the same thing?” he asked Theodore excitedly from Hyderabad.) He was posted on the departure of “the two innocents” (Alice and Theodore) for their summer abroad. He heard how Theodore had climbed the Matterhorn.
“I have tried to make Corinne understand she’s not to marry unless she is sure,” Mittie was still writing in August.
Theodore’s reunion with Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool had been a huge success . . . Theodore and Alice were home again. (”Teddy brought out from London with his dress suits two or three satin waistcoats—purple, pale yellow, and blue, and one rich black silk one,” wrote Mittie. “. . . Emlen has been quite contemptuous about them, and you should hear Douglas standing up for Teddy”) Theodore was “going in” for politics, as a candidate for the State Assembly. . . . Theodore was elected by a margin of fifteen hundred votes.... Uncle Jim’s new house at Oyster Bay was up to the second story.... Father’s old friend Theodore Bronson had died in Paris. . . . Edith Carow had given Theodore and Alice a party and Theodore led an impromptu cotillion. . . . Theodore’s book was finished and delivered to the publisher.
“Has not our dear Thee done well,” Elliott wrote Bamie from Kashmir.
Their letters took anywhere from two to three months to catch up with him, once he got to India, and there was no little frustration in hearing things so long after the fact, and particularly since other news often reached him astonishingly fast. When James A. Garfield was shot in Washington in July, much of the world knew about it in a matter of days. Word of Garfield’s death in September—and of the ascension, incredibly, of Chester A. Arthur to the presidency—reached Elliott in Delhi not much after it did Theodore in Liverpool.
Of his own adventures he could hardly say enough. His travels became ultimately a trip around the world.
Through social contacts in London made possible by the James Roosevelts and with the help of a letter he carried from Secretary of State Evarts, introducing him as the son of the eminent Theodore Roosevelt of New York, he had no trouble making himself welcome among Her Majesty’s forces in India. Arriving at Bombay in mid-January he was put up at the Byculla Club and provided with a full-time servant who slept outside his door. There were lunches (”tiffins”) in his honor, a round of elaborate dinners.
“I would not trust myself to live here,” he wrote Mittie. “There is no temptation to do anything but what you please . . .
“At seven Aya brings me my coffee and cigarette,” he went on, describing a typical day, “and I sit on the veranda lazily taking in all the beauties of the early morning—
At my feet directly under me is the race track and the horses are being taken round for a morning spin. Some of them, beautiful Arabs, bounding by with that long easy stride so sure an indication of the dash and go of the breed. Over the field, beyond the belt of green waving trees yonder, stretches the ocean; as the mist slowly rises, see the boats lazily drift along. To sit and read and think for an hour here is perfect happiness. But the bath is ready by eight, I am dressed for nine o’clock breakfast with Mr. Clark of the Bombay Club, where I go in a buggy or gig, the “hansom” of the city. “Stewed sole—egg toast—prawn curry and beer cup” does not make a bad beginning for the day. A little business, a good deal of sporty talk, and the papers bring a fellow very quickly to M. Vouillon’s two o’clock tiffin in my honor. I cannot describe it, it was all too Arabian night-like. The rich peacock feather hand punka, the delicious perfume, the delicate dishes and still more delicate wines, the quiet service—no sound of boots for the boys go without them, and the clothes make no noise. They are certainly wonderful servants. The afternoon, a call on the Governor of Bombay—and a visit to the Apollo Bunder [a popular rendezvous for fashionable Bombay]—to pay my respects to Mme. Vouillon, who drives in a handsome C-spring landau, two Sikhs, a coachman in scarlet and gold and she herself a beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, looks particularly well, as she is set off by the odd contrast—though there are many other as perfect turnouts and pretty women. Kittredge drives me to the Club, I dress and sit on his right at a dinner he gives me. A fairly fitting ending to the eastern day, a dinner of six, each man his own servant to wait on him and a boy to keep him cool. Then bed—almost in the open air. . . .
To his hosts he was a refreshing novelty—an American sportsman of impeccable taste and manners, a good shot, handsome, high-spirited, a born gentleman. The hard-drinking, polo-playing officers wished only “to give me the best of times.”
En route to Kashmir, as the guest of Sir Salar Jung, regent of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he was escorted to an evening banquet through lines of black men holding flaming torches, dined in the open court of a palace beside a fountain filled with floating candles. He was shown a room made entirely of china, furniture as well. On another day, in company of his British host, Colonel Hastings Fraser, he was received by Sir Salar as though he were a visiting prince—the colonel in full uniform, Elliott in black coat and top hat. “Just fancy your young brother talking, aye, and advising with two of the most celebrated men in these parts,” he wrote Bamie.
On a tiger hunt south of Hyderabad, arranged by Sir Salar, he traveled by horse, by elephant, and by palanquin, a large, covered litter carried on poles by sixteen men. Camp gear was transported by forty camels and there were horses enough to mount the full party of about two hundred men. It was “roughing it” of a rather different kind, he wrote. The usual evening meal “in camp” consisted of soup, salmon, various chicken or veal cutlets, broiled chicken, tongue, wild duck, “gulow” and rice, six or seven different curries, then possible snipe or Welsh rarebit, cheese, and coffee. “And a big pitcher of cooled beer and soda water, which has been in a wet blanket and fanned all day. Each one of us has his pitcher and it is good. The heat gives one an awful thirst...”
The tiger he shot was one of the largest ever seen locally and he was at once a great hero. “Three hours after the blood had been running she weighed 280 lbs.,” he wrote Theodore in a state of utter euphoria. “Her length was 9 feet 1 1/2 inches, height, 3 ft., 7 in.” The “brute” had been “glorious” in her final agony as she made her last charge and he “finished her... with a spare shot from the Bone Crusher—by George, what a hole that gun makes.”
If only his “brave, old Heart of Oak Brother” could have been with him. Here was “sporting work worthy of the Roosevelt name.”
“It is the life, old man. Our kind. The glorious freedom, the greatest excitement. . . . How everything here would have pleased your fondness for the unusual and the dangerous.”
In the parlor at 6 West 57th Street, watching her husband’s reaction to such letters, Alice worried he might at any moment drop everything and leave for India himself. “Poor dear Teddy... longs to be with you and walks up and down the room,” wrote Mittie, “. . . when Alice appealed to him, he smothered her with kisses.”
“This is your last hunt,” Theodore advised solemnly, “so stay as long as you wish . . .”
Dora, Mary Ann, Daniel the butler, were thrilled by his letters, Mittie told him, and so pleased to be remembered by him. Alone of all the family, he regularly inquired for the servants in his letters.
The claws of the tiger would be made up for her as a necklace, Mittie was told. Skin and head were being shipped to London, where Sir John Rae Reid, “the mighty hunter,” would see that a proper rug was prepared. In other letters came word that three crates of skins, heads, and horns were on the way, two crates of painted woodwork from Kashmir, another of silver and gold works, tea sets.
But a siege of fever at Srinagar had also left him feeling and looking like a “perfect bag of bones.” And he was upset terribly by the human wretchedness to be seen everywhere. How could beings created in the image of God be brought so low? “And how easy for the smallest portion to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what we call right, right all the world over and for all time?”
In Europe, at virtually the same moment, traveling by boat with Alice on the Rhine, Theodore puzzled over the numbers of castles on shore. The Age of Chivalry, he speculated, must have been lovely for the knights, but gloomy indeed for those who had to provide the daily bread.
On hearing that Theodore and Alice had purchased land at Oyster Bay on which to build their dream house, Elliott told Theodore wistfully that he too might build something there one day. “We will all live there happily as in old times . . .”
“It delights me beyond bounds to see the way you have ’gone in’ for everything as a son of the dear old father should,” he went on, “and I will come back ready and eager to put my shoulder by yours at the wheel, Thee.”
“How proud of you [I am], Thee, in your life so useful and so actively led at home,” he wrote another time. “Will it be any help to have me one of these days go round with you to back you in your fights, old man?”
Do take care of yourself now for everybody’s sake, the little wife’s (to whom give my best love), the family’s, and mine. I tell you, Thee, I shall need you often in your good old strong way to give a chap a lift or for that matter if I am on the wrong road a blow to knock me back again.
For the sheer pleasure of living, he said in another letter, this to Bamie, he had never known anything to equal his time in India. But a life lived solely for pleasure was not in the cards; it was not “‘our way,’ for that means life for an end.”
In Ceylon he brought down two elephants, killing the second only after it had chased him through the jungle for two and a half hours, Elliott running as fast as he could the whole time. He had hit it in one eye with his first shot, but that had not slowed the animal in the slightest: “. . .it was only after I had put sixteen bullets into him that his great, crushing weight fell down in the bamboos.”
From Ceylon he went to Singapore and from there to Saigon, in the teeth of a typhoon. Saigon had “the quaint air of old France . . . much shipping and an air of thrift and quiet comfort that reminded one more than anything else of a prosperous southern city in the old days, say in Louisiana.” At Hong Kong he took a side trip to Canton, riding an “ordinary American river steamboat” up the Pearl River, “really into China proper.”
That was late in December 1881, or about the time Theodore was making ready to leave for his first session in the Albany legislature. In January, from the neat, curtained privacy of Aunt Anna Gracie’s house on West 36th Street, Aunt Ella Bulloch, in New York for a brief visit, wrote Elliott of the long conversation she and “Teddy” had just had, “mostly about you, darling.”
“The dear old fellow is back from Albany on a short leave and spent an hour with me . . . and we gloried in you together, Teddy exclaiming, ’What a fellow that is!’”
I was so glad to find that Teddy too thinks so highly of your power of influence with others. He spoke of the differences between you in this respect with such noble generous warmth and said that where he would naturally wish to surpass other men, he could never hold in his heart a jealous feeling toward you. Then we talked of his book and his political interests. Thee thinks these will only help in giving him some fame, but neither he says will be of practical value, or giving him advancement, but says he must begin again at the beginning.... So that you will both in point of fact start your career together, he having gained this intermediate experience while you gain yours in a different way during your travels. Thee is a dear “grand” old fellow in very truth. . . . Sometimes he reminds me so much of you . . .
Then the morning of March 11, 1882, having been gone a year and four months, Elliott walked through the front door at 6 West 57th Street and a week or so after that, having dined privately with him, having listened to his stories, Aunt Annie, we know from her diary, was in church, head bowed, praying to God “to cure him”—but of what, whether of some mysterious Oriental fever or of his old “nervous” seizures or of drinking, is not known. “Ellie is very ill” is all she says in another entry.
Whatever the problem, it does not seem to have held him back. He was asked by the James Roosevelts to be a godfather for their infant son, Franklin Delano, an honor that touched him deeply, as he wrote in reply, and one he would have declined had not “my dear mother . . . persuaded me that I should accept.” (The small ceremony took place at Hyde Park’s St. James Chapel on March 20, just nine days after his return.) And when Corinne was at last married that April, he performed his supporting part admirably, convinced like everyone else—everyone but Corinne—that Douglas Robinson was the ideal match, “a good fellow . . . worthy of our bright, innocent little girl.” Theodore gave her away before a flower-banked altar at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church; the reception followed at 6 West 57th Street; Corinne, it is said, spent the better part of the day weeping.
“My little heart,” Elliott had written her from India, “if I could only take you in my arms and kiss you this evening, pet you and love you. . . . Ah! My little love ... I smile to myself now as I recall the old dreams about you, Baby Sister, now a big woman going to be married . . .”
“Why if you don’t take him [Douglas Robinson],” reads another letter, “you and Old Nell will keep house in some cozy country corner all by ourselves . . .”
“Dear Elliott has been such a loving, tender brother to me,” Corinne once told Douglas. Elliott was so much more sensitive than other men, so much more understanding and considerate of her feelings and of her shortcomings, never dogmatic or judgmental. “How different people are,” she mused; “there is Teddy, for instance, he is devoted to me too, but if I were to do something that he thought very weak or wrong, he would never forgive me, whereas Elliott no matter how much he might despise the sin, would forgive the sinner . . .”
